Red at the Bone

The dress Melody wears to her ceremony symbolizes the expectations Melody fulfills in her mother’s place, as well as the things Melody has inherited from her mother. It is a tailored, tea-length dress made of lace and silk. The fine quality of it, and the fact that it was tailor-made for Iris—and then altered for Melody—communicates their wealth. The attention Sabe gives to every detail of the dress conveys how significant the ceremony is for their family—particularly because they could not host one for Iris.

This dress represents different things for the three generations of women in this family. For Sabe, it represents the family’s social and economic status, which she and Po’Boy fought and sacrificed to attain. For Iris, it is a reminder of the life she could have had, the life that “the baby in [her] belly” prevented (6). For Melody, it signifies the onus placed on her to heal her family.

Melody’s ceremony, being “the only ceremony skipping a generation of mothers showing daughters” (4), emphasizes the shared trauma among the older generation and how Melody’s ceremony both re-exposes and heals the wounds of the past.